The Cadets Who Never Left

An undertaker guarding an empty hotel ought to have been difficult to frighten. But according to a story collected by Venice author Kim Cool, David Farley found himself threatening to release a dog he no longer had.

Farley and three associates had purchased the former San Marco Hotel with plans to restore it. A security company initially supplied a guard and a large dog to discourage trespassers. When that arrangement became too expensive, Farley took over the night watch himself. Then came the voices and unexplained noises. His warnings about the dog were a bluff, and whatever he heard apparently remained unimpressed.

It is a wonderfully peculiar chapter in the history of a building that has been welcoming people, and scaring them, for nearly a century.

At 238 W. Tampa Ave. in downtown Venice, the former San Marco Hotel is now known as Venice Centre Mall. Its shops and upstairs residences occupy a building commissioned by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers during the city’s ambitious beginnings.

Completed in the fall of 1926, the three-story hotel reportedly took just 90 days to build and cost approximately $300,000. It offered 92 guest rooms above a ground floor with space for 13 shops. Its Mediterranean Revival appearance suited the developing city, and its concrete blocks and original red roof tiles came from the nearby Venice Tile Company.

The hotel was part of an enormous bet on Florida real estate. Prospective buyers needed somewhere to stay while considering a piece of the new city. For a brief time, the San Marco offered accommodations in a place whose future seemed assured.

The collapse of the land boom and the Great Depression brought a much harsher reality. Venice struggled to pay its employees and even keep its streetlights on. The hotel eventually stood empty, awaiting a different kind of guest. 

In 1932, the Kentucky Military Institute leased the San Marco and nearby Hotel Venice for its winter headquarters. Its first Venice winter session followed in 1933. Classrooms occupied the San Marco’s ground floor, while cadets lived upstairs. Each season, the school brought students and faculty south for the months between the new year and Easter. 

On parade grounds south of the San Marco, cadets in dress uniforms performed for spectators from surrounding communities. The space is now a municipal parking lot, an ordinary downtown convenience with a rather more ceremonial past.

KMI’s Venice operations ended in 1970. After a period of vacancy, renovations in the mid-1970s returned the San Marco to a combination of residences and ground-floor businesses. The cadets had moved out, although Cool’s “Ghost Stories of Venice, Old and New” suggests that a few may have missed the departure

Among the encounters she recounts is one involving Normalinda Hayes, a massage therapist with a ground-floor business. Hayes was doing laundry on the third floor one evening when a uniformed man sprang from a dark corner and frightened her.

When she described what had happened, the story apparently sounded familiar. A mischievous apparition, believed to be a former cadet, was said to enjoy surprising people from shadowy hiding places. If the account is to be believed, decades had done little to improve his manners.

Another story in Cool’s collection has a sadder quality. A cook fetching ingredients encountered a young man in military uniform crouched in a pantry corner. He appeared to be crying. She asked what was wrong, but he offered no answer. When she returned with help, he was gone.

These are reported encounters, with no established explanation for what the witnesses experienced. Still, the details give the old building’s history a human scale. The cadets who wintered in Venice were young men away from home, living in a former hotel, attending classes and becoming part of a small Florida community.

A century after its construction, the San Marco survives because people found new uses for it. Visitors can shop downstairs and look up at rooms that once housed hotel guests and military students. And thanks to the stories collected by Cool, a dark corner upstairs may invite a second glance.